


Partnership

by inelegantly (Lir)



Series: SASO 2015 Fills [6]
Category: Love Live! School Idol Project
Genre: Alternate Universe, Challenge: Sports Anime Shipping Olympics | SASO 2015, Comrades in Arms, F/F, Partnership, Protectiveness, Puella Magi Madoka Magica AU, Wordcount: 1.000-3.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-29
Updated: 2015-06-29
Packaged: 2018-04-06 17:14:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4230117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lir/pseuds/inelegantly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Of all the girls Nico might have chosen to work with, Nishikino Maki is well at the bottom of her list. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, there is no other magical girl in Nico's area stronger than Maki, and that leaves her with no other choice in partners if she wants to save her own skin from a threat she cannot handle alone. And when the day comes for them to face down a witch more powerful than any they'd yet taken on, alone or together, Nico and Maki walk into the situation shoulder to shoulder.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Partnership

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the first bonus round of the 2015 [Sports Anime Shipping Olympics](http://sportsanime.dreamwidth.org), more or less with the entire death scene where [Homura shoots Madoka](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFQRp6EP_JM) in PMMM as the quote prompt. Most specifically, the lines this fic draws from for its premise are as follows: 
> 
> " _Can I ask one more thing? Don't let... me turn into a witch. There's awful, horrible things in this world, I know that now. But there's a lot of things worth protecting too._ "
> 
> and
> 
> " _How about we become monsters together, and lay waste to this awful world?_ "
> 
> Or: This is the Love Live Puella Magi Madoka Magica AU that literally no one asked for, which I streamlined as much as possible as per the SASO goal of writing short fics. It still got a little out of hand, and I still wish I could expand it further.

* * *

Of all the girls Nico might have chosen to work with, Nishikino Maki is well at the bottom of her list.

Maki is too pretty, too perfect, always showing up at the nexus of a disturbance with the most infuriating of cool airs about her. Nico knows that this is the reason Maki has survived for as long as she has – there's no way a magical girl keeps her blood in her body around witches if she can't keep a cool head. And yet every time Nico sees lovely, flawless Maki arriving just before her to a witch's lair it absolutely makes her want to puke. 

Unfortunately, there is no other magical girl in Nico's area stronger than Maki, and that leaves her with no other choice in partners if she wants to save her own skin from a threat she cannot handle alone. 

"We're doing this my way," she tells Maki, when she first proposes the partnership. "I have seniority. _You_ have to listen to me." 

Maki only stares at her, with a slow, contemplative look, and replies with, "Alright." 

"A-Alright?" Nico splutters. "What do you mean, just, 'alright'? Don't you want to discuss the terms we're going to be working together under?" 

"Not particularly," Maki says, brushing her hair back from her neck. "You're right. You have been doing this even longer than I have. If that isn't a fact I can trust, I don't know what is." 

It absolutely makes Nico's blood boil. 

She makes sure she's the one to go in first, every time they face down a witch. She strides ahead, skirts bouncing with every step and chin held high, never looking back to make sure Maki is following. She tells herself it's because if Maki _isn't,_ then Maki wasn't good enough to watch her back in the first place. 

(She suspects, someplace deep down, that it's truly because she knows that Maki will not fail her.)

The first time Maki saves her, Nico can't believe it. A tendril of something rotting snaps by right in front of her face, like a whip crack, studded all over with thorns of broken glass and glistening wetly in the dim light and all Nico can think is, _that would have taken my head off at the neck if I was just an inch closer._

She shakes Maki's hand off her collar and brushes her hands down her skirt, righting her clothes as if it'll steady her nerves before she again joins the fight.

When it's over, she tosses Maki the grief seed she snatched up, after ending the witch herself. "Here," she says, like it's nothing. "I reckon you could use it, since you must not have as many stored up as you could." 

Maki looks at her, another one of those lingering, thoughtful looks that Nico hates so much, and slowly nods her head. "Thank you. And you're welcome." 

Nico doesn't have the control to stop her spluttering. 

She gets her chance to pay Maki back, jumping in front of her and into the line of fire, deflecting the missiles aimed at both of them as the very labyrinth itself shrieks all around them. Her head is on fire and her ears are ringing and even over the howling coming from every direction she can hear the pinging of each attack she slices aside as it slides off her sword. As soon as Maki recovers, she can hear Maki's return fire, too. 

She can feel Maki's back pressed to hers, as Maki retreats to the same location, guarding her on one side as Nico slices forward on the other, carving a path for themselves deep into the witch's lair. 

Nico makes sure to always pay Maki back, to never let Maki protect her without protecting Maki in turn. She tells herself, it's only fair, it's only making sure she owes nothing to the ice-princess she's partnered with that she cannot repay in one turn. 

(She tells herself that, but she doesn't believe it, knows deep down that more than anything she's viciously protecting what's hers, _hers,_ HERS, that after so many close calls together she's dug her teeth into Maki and is never letting go.)

"Don't stare at me," she insists one day, when they're sitting on the school lawn in between facing life-or-death perils. "I didn't say you could look." 

She ignores the fact that she's the one who sought out Maki, by wandering around the grounds until that familiar red head of hair drew her forth like a beacon. She ignores that it's Maki's lunch she's mooching off of, snagging one of the red-bean buns Maki purchased and pretending she doesn't see the tiniest flicker of a smile at Maki's lips before she swallows anything like a protest. 

"Was I staring?" Maki asks, tilting her head to the side and leveling Nico with an arch look. "I hadn't noticed." 

"You were," Nico huffs. "It's very rude, I'll have you know. I'm aware that I'm very popular and pretty and that it must be hard for you, not to take the opportunity to look, but you should control yourself." 

Maki actually laughs at her, a high, musical sound, like the pealing of bells.

"I was just thinking," Maki says. "That I know so little about you. We fight together with absolute dependence on each other, and we go to the same school, but how many real conversations have we ever had with each other?" 

"I don't—" Nico starts, the protest on her tongue before she's even taken a moment to think. But she bites it off, swallowing the words down as it really _hits_ her what Maki is saying. "There isn't a lot else worth talking about, when you're a magical girl. What are we supposed to say? Hi, how are you, how's the weather, did you have time to get your homework done in between killing a witch and washing the blood out of your clothes?" 

"Maybe not a conversation like that," Maki says primly. "But a conversation where we learn something about the other." 

"I know everything about you I need to know," Nico insists. "You're a pinpoint shot and you don't ever stay down." 

Maki laughs, a soft little "hmph" of a sound before she's cracking a smile. "I'll take that as a compliment. By that logic, I know everything I need to know about you, too. Although I have to admit, you aren't the type of person I would have expected to fight with a blade." 

"...I'm not?" Nico asks, caught off-guard enough not to posture. "Why not?" 

"I can't say, exactly," Maki admits. "But you know, it's all very personal, with a blade. A sword doesn't allow you to do anything save get right up in your enemy's face and address them yourself." 

"Hah!" Nico laughs. "If that's how it is, then your weapon is perfect for you. Cold and aloof, picking enemies off with bullets from a barrel. There's nothing personal about that." 

"I don't know," Maki says, thoughtfully. "I always thought that there was something very personal about being a sniper – you have to pin down your target exactly, and isn't that rather intimate? Of course, we don't always have time for that sort of care. So maybe you're right after all." 

Nico scowls, but she's silent. She wants Maki to be right, that they don't talk, that they don't know anything personal about each other. But when she thinks about their fighting styles, bullets and blades, about how she wouldn't have thought at the beginning that they could compliment each other only for her to work with Maki far more fluidly than she ever could have imagined... No, she still doesn't know anything personal about Maki at all. 

"Of course I'm right," she says at last, forcing some of her usual pridefulness into the words. "I always am." 

"You always are," Maki says, and for some reason, her agreement only sounds like Nico losing the argument.

When the day comes for them to face down a witch more powerful than any they'd yet taken on, alone or together, Nico and Maki walk into the situation shoulder to shoulder. 

They both know how slim their chances are, but they have no other choice. 

When they stumble back out of the witch's lair, eyes too dulled to even marvel at the unbelievable sight of their ordinary world all around them, both of their soul gems are clouded and dark. Maki drops to her knees and rolls hers out across the palm of her hand, fingers trembling so badly that it drops from her palm and rolls across the floor. 

"Don't," Nico says, bent over on hands and knees and so weak that her limbs can barely hold her upright. She reaches for Maki's soul gem, and it feels like moving in slow motion, like her arm is pushing through molasses. "This is important. Do you... Have any grief seeds left?" 

"No," Maki says, plucking her soul gem back out of Nico's fingers and flopping weakly onto her back. 

"Me neither," Nico admits, giving in to the weakness of her arms and lying down on her front, right there on the dusty ground. She curves her body just enough that she can see the side of Maki's face – the curve of one cheekbone, the proud arch of her nose, the tiny gap between pink, parted lips. "We're really through, aren't we?" 

"It looks that way," Maki says.

And that's when it hits Nico. All of her kicking, and fighting, and struggling to survive, and she's going to go out like this? On her belly, like a dog, hollowed-out and empty and unable to even rail back against a universe that had finally succeeded in cheating her? 

"I won't," she bites out. "I won't let it be through, this isn't the end. Let's become monsters together, Maki, let's tear this whole place apart." 

She drags herself toward Maki with the last of her strength, pushing herself up on arms that tremble and threaten to give just in order to stare down into Maki's pretty, too-composed face. She's grimacing and near-sobbing herself, ugly with the impotent frustration overcoming her under the circumstance. 

"If we're going to become witches, I'll do it with you, and we'll wreck the world that put us here," Nico insists. 

"But Nico-chan," Maki says, one hand reaching up to brush a few strands from one of Nico's pigtails away from her face. "Didn't I ever tell you? My family are all doctors." 

"I don't _care,_ " Nico says, not seeing her point. "No one cares about them, any more than they care about us. This is the end of the road for us unless we _make_ a new and terrible road for ourselves!" 

"I know there are horrible things in the world," Maki says, staring up into Nico's face, letting her fingers gently linger against Nico's cheek. "I've seen so many of them with my own eyes. But I have always wanted to protect those things that are still beautiful." 

She smiles, and it's the most hideous thing Nico has ever seen, too-sincere and cracking apart at the edges, like underneath it Maki is grimacing in pain. 

"I don't want to become a witch," Maki says. "But more than that, I don't want you to become one either." 

Nico realizes, she can no longer feel Maki's hand on her face. She also realizes, she can feel something cold and hard pressing up between her breasts. 

"Tell me when," Maki says, eyes bright and feverishly committed. "If it's the only way I can protect you, I'll do it."

"Are you calling me beautiful?" Nico asks. 

"Hmph," Maki says, and her smile then is prettier, miraculously less pained. "Maybe I am." 

Nico reaches her hand down, closes her fingers around the barrel of Maki's gun just to make sure that it's real. She doesn't want to die. She doesn't want to let the universe cheat her. But most of all, she doesn't want to lose what's _hers, hers, hers,_ and with Maki smiling at her so gently and promising to protect her, she can't find the strength left in her body to say no.

"I'll be right behind you," Maki says. 

Nico takes a deep breath, closes her eyes, and whispers back, "Then do it. I'm ready to go." 

She isn't expecting it, braced as she is for the bullet to rip through her, when Maki pulls her down with a hand at the back of her neck. She feels the soft press of Maki's lips against her lips, and before her eyes can spring open in surprise, the crack of the gun sounds, as the very last thing Nico hears.

* * *


End file.
